The Iran Show

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.

Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power. In part, this is because the accused are connected to a mass movement: Iranians whose democratic aspirations have evolved organically within the culture of the Islamic Republic. It is one thing to persuade citizens that a narrow band of apparatchiks are enemies of the state. It is quite another to claim that a political agenda with broad support—for popular sovereignty, human rights, due process, freedom of speech—has been covertly planted by foreigners.

The indictments prepared by the public prosecutor are almost surreally obtuse. Before the election, one indictment claims, Western governments, foundations, and individuals joined forces with corrupt Iranians in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic and institute a regime compliant with American designs. The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.

Forced confessions have been part of Iran’s penal system since the mid-nineteen-seventies. But it was the Islamic Republic that turned the auditorium of Evin Prison, in Tehran, into a macabre theatre. In 1982, after a fierce fight between the extremist theocrats in the government and the radical Muslim guerrillas outside it, the revolutionary regime began broadcasting confessions from Evin. The prisoners—mainly secular leftists and Muslim guerrillas—recanted their views and apologized for betraying Islam. Ervand Abrahamian, the author of “Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran,” quotes a witness who said of the night a major leftist recanted, “Something snapped inside all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”

Revulsion was, in many ways, the point. Those who confessed not only implicated themselves; they implicated others. They persuaded the public either of the existence of malevolent plots against the state or—more likely—of the state’s ruthlessness in crushing opponents. A few Iranians who confessed even became agents of the state, betraying former colleagues. These repenters became hated figures, and the word for them, tavab, a term of abuse. In an era of warring ideologies, the only meaningful contest was for domination, and the repenters were clearly the losers. In 1988, Iran’s inquisition came to a climax with the systematic execution of thousands of political prisoners.

For more than a decade afterward, forced confessions all but disappeared from the airwaves, not because the regime had softened but because it no longer needed them. When the hard-liners again felt threatened, earlier this decade, bogus confessions reappeared on state television. But by then the tactic was badly matched to the threat, which came from former members of the ruling clique who had mellowed as the revolution entered middle age. Such are today’s defendants. They are not ideological warriors but, rather, reformists who have called for incremental, democratic change.

And so a spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror has instead stoked fury and derision. The regime has lost control of the political discussion within Iran, which is focussing on the abuse of prisoners rather than on the perfidy of foreigners or the futility of resistance. On July 31st, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric and former Presidential candidate, shattered a taboo by airing allegations of rape and sexual abuse inside Iran’s prisons. The authorities responded by shutting down a newspaper that Karroubi published. But the burden of shame had shifted squarely from the prisoners to their wardens. A senior ayatollah praised Karroubi, quoting Muhammad: “A realm will survive without believing in God, but will not survive with oppression.”

Meanwhile, Iranians are turning the show trials into a kind of black comedy, by mocking the predictability of their ugliness. Last month, Mohsen Armin, a prominent reformist, issued a preëmptive statement declaring that, no matter what he might say should he be taken to prison, he is not the agent of foreign powers. Perhaps no one has done more to undermine the effect of forced confessions than Ebrahim Nabavi, an exiled Iranian satirist who has released a parody confession video. Dressed in striped pajamas and wearing bandages, he confesses to meeting with a C.I.A. agent, importing green velvet, and having affairs with Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie (“She had a very ugly and terrible husband”). He apologizes to the Supreme Leader and to the paramilitaries who “kindly” beat him.

In today’s Iran, the interrogator, not the repenter, has become the object of rage and ridicule. Recanting under pressure, Abrahamian told me, is now seen as a sign not of weakness or treachery but, rather, of “being human.” The display of systemic cruelty is not chilling but galvanizing.

Iran was a radical place in the eighties. Both the regime and much of its opposition were absolutist, utopian, messianic, apocalyptic. Forced confessions, so effective in that climate, convey little more than illegitimacy when they are used against an opposition that is asking for the counting of votes and the rule of law. Today’s show trials are a sign of how much Iran has changed in the past thirty years, and how poorly its regime has kept pace. ♦